Today's interview is with Benjamin Houy, a self-taught developer who is making $12k a month with his startup for French language learners. Read on for his tips on learning to code, how buying a boilerplate helped him and how he chose Ruby on Rails.
Hey, so can you introduce yourself?
I’m Benjamin, a Frenchman living in London and the founder of French Together. French Together started as a blog 10 years ago while I was studying in Germany and became my full-time job over the next few years. When the COVID pandemic struck, I decided to turn my main product (an interactive ebook) into a proper web app. If you always wanted to make a business, you can read more about French Together on the High Signal website for founders.
Learning how to code is something I have always wanted to do. Back when I was a kid, I learned a bit of C++, Python and PHP but never really got deep into it. Somehow, there was always a point when I would lose interest and switch to something else.
When the COVID pandemic hit, I was in a comfortably uncomfortable situation. I had a profitable business and many happy customers but I was also bored and in search of a challenge. French Together was earning enough to pay myself a nice London salary but I wasn’t happy with the product I was selling (an interactive ebook.)
The ebook was made up of dialogues based on high-frequency French vocabulary together with audio recorded by native speakers. Think of it as a French conversation crash course in ebook format. Many students were happily using it but the ebook format meant it was difficult to use because it required downloading a third-party reader app.
I had a high refund rate because many students (particularly elderly customers) were struggling to open it. I was also getting feature requests I really wanted to implement but couldn’t due to the inherent limitations of the EPUB3 format. I had been thinking about learning how to code but it had always felt like an impossible goal. A dream that was never meant to be realized.
Then COVID hit and my SEO traffic started declining. I ignored it at first, telling myself it would get better. Months went by with my traffic declining a little more every month.
After a while, I had to face the inevitable: my traffic wasn’t coming back. What I took for a simple seasonal change was in fact a shift in the market. I found myself backed in a corner with only 2 choices: let the business die, or reinvent it. I went for the latter and decided to finally learn how to code.
How did you learn coding?
I already knew a bit of HTML/CSS and JavaScript I had learned over the years but felt like trying something new. So I bought an Elixir course and started learning this new language. It was going well and I was making progress but my developer friends kept telling me Elixir was a bad choice for a beginner because it’s a fairly niche language and has fewer libraries and resources than more established languages.
